


March Goes out like a Lion

by MercuryPoisoning



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, As Usual Someone Dies In The First Chapter, Depressed Jack Frost (Guardians of Childhood), Don't Read This, Don't say I didn't warn you, Fear, Gen, Honestly Just So Much Angst, I'm Going to Hell, Jack Feels, Jack Frost (Guardians of Childhood) Angst, Jack Frost (Guardians of Childhood)-centric, Jack Needs a Hug, Jamie Needs A Hug Too, Just A Lot Of Crying And Sadness, Minor Original Character(s), Nightmares, No Slash, Older Jamie Bennett (Rise of the Guardians), Poor Jack, Post-Canon, Sophie Bennett Needs A Hug, Sorry Not Sorry, Suicide Attempt, There's No Comic Relief, What Have I Done, why do I always do this
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-09
Updated: 2018-07-09
Packaged: 2019-06-07 16:24:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15223064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercuryPoisoning/pseuds/MercuryPoisoning
Summary: It's been thirty-two years since Pitch was defeated, and Jack has forgotten how to laugh. As his world crashes down around him, the Guardians are faced with a troubling question: is the darkness within Jack a new, unprecedented issue? Or has it always been there?





	March Goes out like a Lion

**Author's Note:**

> Hello and welcome to my little hellhole of the internet! This fandom may be dead, but bitch I sure ain't. I had inspiration, so I wrote. I wrote, so I published. 
> 
> Before we get started, I would like to politely remind anyone bothering to read this that there will be reference to suicide. Please, please be responsible and do not read any further if you expect you'll be triggered. 
> 
> This story takes place roughly 20 years after the movie. Jamie is a grown ass man. If my timeline ever seems weird please point it out, because this stuff always confuses me. Also, I apologize in advance: I really doubt that comic relief will present itself in any form throughout this story. This is meant to be an emotional exploration of Jack's darkness, not his joy & humour. You can expect a happy ending, but you'll have to work for it >:)
> 
> Alright, I think that's it, so let's get on with the first chapter! Enjoy!

It was late in the afternoon. Frigid winds swept gusts of snow across the mess blocking a four-street intersection somewhere in Interior Canada. The wind howled; sirens wailed. On a telephone wire high above the carnage and police cars, a pale, skinny figure perched. His staff hung limp at his side like a broken tree branch, and his face was shrouded by a blue hood. As the snow scudded across the ice rink that was the road, a sharp explosion of freezing wind whipped off the boy's hood, revealing piercing ice-blue eyes.

The sirens screamed. Jack Frost watched.

Below him, the ice had been interrupted by a blazing inferno; the air reeked of burning rubber and singed hair. Two cars had collided, nose to nose, and the smaller one had flipped and skidded, the engine catching fire in under a minute. The other sat crumpled in the centre of the intersection, its three unharmed young occupants standing in shock. One was yelling frantically into a cellphone. The other two huddled together, watching the burning car with horror on their wind-nipped faces. Two ambulances, a fire truck, and a police chief screeched up, and the young people were herded away by cops. The air crackled with the static of walkie-talkies.

Jack's heart thudded against his rib cage as the fire was put out and the medical team advanced. After what felt like an eternity but was really under five minutes, the occupants were extracted. A mother and child - Jack's breath caught in his throat. The mother was placed on a stretcher and carried into one of the waiting ambulances. The baby was pronounced dead.

Jack teetered, his breath returning in harsh, shallow gasps. His vision swam and his arms tingled in and out of feeling. Below him, the mother's blonde hair glinted up at him with scathing familiarity, and Jack's stomach lurched. He tumbled from the wire and landed in a puff of snow not far from the ambulance.

One of the teenagers was in hysterics. The police had done their best to cover the baby, but she had seen. She was on her knees in the snow and her face was blotched with tears.

Jack looked down at his feet and saw the ice thickening beneath him.

His cheeks burned.

He hadn't cried in - oh, hundreds of years. Not since that first awful night. As the children had run through him the the frost had crept in around him, he'd cried and it had hurt so bad he'd vowed never to let it come to that again. The tears had frozen on his face and felt like little knives of fire piercing his flesh. To this day he'd never found out why it pained him so to cry - yet there he was, crouched on the side of the road as lives fell apart before him, and he was crying.

He wanted to scream. To yell. To shout something, anything - somehow give vent to his raging grief and the tears burning his face. Instead, he clamped both hands over his mouth, and the tears ran over his hands and burned them too. He barely felt it. The wailing sirens and flashing lights made his head spin, and he bit into his palm to shut himself up.

Without warning, a familiar voice boomed out behind him. “Zis is your doing, Frost?"

It was neither accusing nor sympathetic - just disappointed. Jack felt it like a knife to his gut.

"Hi, North," he choked out, fighting to keep his voice expressionless. "Yeah. This is my doing."

North did not respond. He moved to stand next to Jack, his great robes swirling in the wind, and together they watched the ambulances wail out of sight.

"You are crying," North noted, with some surprise.

"I noticed," Jack returned bluntly. He wiped his face reflexively but it only made the burning worse.

“Zis is not really your fault, Jack,” North rumbled. “You did not intentionally cause ze accident. If anything, it is zis foolish intersection. Why have four roads hitting eachother? Ridiculous. Zey should know better.”

 _Who's fault is it that the roads are so hazardous in the first place?_ I _should know better_. Jack fought tooth and nail against the tears as the teenagers were removed in a cop car. After about ten minutes, North spoke again.

“Ze baby is dead."

Jack's teeth cut through his bottom lip and his shoulders quaked violently. "I noticed," he rasped again, but his voice broke in the middle as blood flooded his mouth. North sat down heavily next to him.

"Jack," he said, and Jack had never heard him take on such a serious tone. "Look at me."

Jack couldn't do it. North sighed.

"Jack, you come to us ven you are not having good time,” North sighed, sounded suddenly very old and weary. "You  _talk_ to us, by Shostakovich! You are losing yourself. Very bad."

Jack could not respond. What was there to say? North was right, of course, and he knew it. They all knew it. Jack had no illusions about his fellow Guardians. They knew something was wrong with him, and they confronted him about it regularly. Yet he had no answers for them. He didn't understand what he was feeling either.

"Jack," North boomed warningly.

"I can't!" Jack burst out, leaping to his feet and spinning to face his companion at last. "I can't talk about it! I don't want to talk about it! What's there to say? A baby is dead and her mother probably won't even live to see the funeral and you want me to _talk_? It's my fault, North, is that what you want me to say? It's _my goddamn fault_!"

"Calm down," North said steadily, his heavy brows furrowed in stern pity.

Jack's heart was pounding and his thoughts were jumping wildly. Some part of him knew he was being unreasonable. And another part of him hated North's calm gaze and steady words. How could he be so calm - so steadfast - how could he just look at Jack with such disgusting pity in his eyes? How _dare_ he!

Jack quivered on the edge of angry words before he turned away and yanked up his hood. He dragged up a ragged breath and tried to relax his shoulders.

"See you, North," he said quietly, and, brandishing his staff, he stepped into the wind and left the big Guardian sitting alone on the snow-swept boulevard.

+++

Jack had started "losing himself" - as North put it - nearly twenty years ago. There was no clear way to pinpoint what had triggered this downward spiral: all Jack knew was that at one point he'd begun waking up drenched in sweat and shaking. He'd started drifting through cities without seeing them. He'd stopped laughing. When his laughter went, his ability to give laughter had gone too. He tried - God, he tried so hard - but it seemed the harder he tried to be happy, the more he lost control of his powers. Ice damaged drain pipes and cracked windows. It flooded basements when it melted. Flash freezes destroyed springtime flowers. Areas of the world that normally didn't experience cold weather conditions were stricken with winters they were not equipped to deal with. Blizzards and ice rain made it dangerous to drive. And, well, icy roads killed babies.

Pitch may have been defeated thirty-two years ago, but fear had taken root in Jack's heart and it was creeping through his body like a cancer.

It wasn't that the other four Guardians weren't aware of this. He had talked to them in the beginning, assuming that if they all worked together things would be okay again. It didn't work out that way. Toothiana called up his favourite memories, Bunnymund gave him crass pep talks, North developed strategies for reversing the potent effects of his powers, Sandy infused his dreams with joy and sweetness. The dreams always turned sour. No headway was made. Bunny was the first to snap, shouting at Jack to grow up and stop feeling sorry for himself. Jack froze two-thirds of his eggs. That was fifteen years ago, and they hadn't spoken a word to each other since.

Jack stopped initiating contact with the Guardians.

Which was why he was where he was - balanced precariously on the small window ledge of a eleventh-story hospital room. The wind hissed around him. He touched the glass and made frost curl over it in a burst of flowering ice.

The room had only one occupant. She lay on her back, surrounded by beeping monitors and scribbling doctors. An IV tube fed into her pale forearm, and her face was obscured by oxygen apparatus. Jack could only fully see her long blonde hair, spreading in a tangled, bloody mess over one side of her pillow. From his vantage point he could not even make out the rise and fall of her chest. The idea struck a pang of despair to his shuddering heart.

Now would likely be the best time to slip into the room, amid all the commotion. The window was latched; Jack used his frost to flip the lock and quietly nudged open the window. Jumping five feet from the window to the squeaky-clean floor, Jack assessed the situation from a closer stance. He edged slowly up to the woman’s bedside. Doctors and nurses ran through his body without seeing him. Jack bent closer to inspect her face and felt the bile rise to his throat.

Just as he had feared. The woman was Sophie Bennett.

Although, she was no longer Sophie Bennett - now she was Sophie Bennett-Wei, and her husband was Darren Wei, and two years ago they’d had a little girl named Anne-Marie. Anne-Marie was the light of Sophie’s life, and Darren was a fiercely loving father. Jamie, meanwhile, would speak of nothing but Anne-Marie. Jamie and his wife and suffered through a miscarriage five years before the coming of Anne-Marie Wei; yet, somehow, his giggling little niece had brought the childish sparkle back into Jamie’s eyes. It had made Jack happy to see it.

He watched the barely-perceptible movement of Sophie’s chest, and knew he’d _really_ screwed up this time.

Jack lost track of the time he spent watching Sophie’s chest struggle to rise, fall, rise, fall. Some insistent, illogical part of him was terrified that, if he looked away for even one second, the slow rhythm would be snuffed out. It wasn’t until the last doctor had bustled out of the room that Jack realized it was really getting on; and he had work to do tonight. It was going to snow.

He was halfway towards the half-open window when someone else entered the room.

Jamie was in his mid-thirties now. He stood at a strapping 6’4” and he evidently hadn’t shaved in a few days, but his brown eyes were wide and scared. In that moment, he looked to Jack like the child he’d sent flying down the street on a sled over twenty years ago. 

“Jamie,” breathed Jack, but the man ignored him and ran straight to his sister. A harried-looking nurse followed him in, accompanied by Jamie’s wife. 

“Sophie, Sophie, Sophie,” Jamie gasped out, sinking to his knees and grabbing Sophie’s limp hand. The nurse started forward with a noise of disapproval. 

“Be careful with her,” she said, sounding unhealthily exhausted. “She’s in critical condition. You’re only here because you’re immediate family.”

Jamie dropped his sister’s hand. He had no response. His wife joined him by the bed and put a gentle arm around his shoulder, and the nurse left the room tactfully.

“This shouldn’t have happened,” Jamie rasped, his voice hollow.

“I know,” his wife breathed, burying her face in his shoulder and succumbing to tears.

“I know,” Jack echoed, watching the couple with an aching feeling in his gut. _This is all my doing_.

“Anne-Marie…” Jamie started, but his voice trailed off forlornly and his shoulders trembled.

Jack could take it no longer. He ran to Jamie’s side, crouching down next to him. “Jamie,” he said desperately. “Please talk to me!”

Jamie didn’t respond. He wouldn’t even look at Jack, his swimming brown gaze staring fixedly at his sister.

“Jamie,” Jack faltered.

Suddenly, Jamie got to his feet. He was clutching his stomach and his face was worryingly pale.

“What’s wrong?” his wife asked, alarmed.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” he whispered, and then he ran for the door.

And he ran _right through Jack_.

The shock of it sent Jack reeling. He stumbled back, a dreadful feeling sweeping over him. Awful realization dawned: Jamie hadn’t been ignoring him. He just hadn’t _heard_ him.

Jack felt as though his whole body was simultaneously burning up and losing all feeling. Was he dreaming? A violent pinch to his wrist told him otherwise. He was very much awake, and he was standing in a hospital room with the unconscious form of Sophie Bennett, and Jamie was retching into a garbage can outside the door, and there was a loud ringing in his ears, and Jack knew with the most horrible certainty -

Jamie no longer believed in him. 

**Author's Note:**

> We all have those days.
> 
> Just kidding... not all of us. 
> 
> Jack does, though.
> 
> Tell me your thoughts! And stay tuned for the next chapter!
> 
> ~MercuryPoisoning


End file.
